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June 22, 2005
 
BOOK REVIEWS: 'Sinatra: The Life'; 'Strom': Another Guy who did it His Way; Rudy Giuliani 'The Prince of the City'
 
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
Hinton (HNN) — When I heard about the big new biography of Frank Sinatra from A. A. Knopf, "Sinatra: The Life" by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan" $26.95, 592 pages, 32 pages of photographs), I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I'm a fan of big biographies and have devoured hundreds in my reading/reviewing career. After finishing the book, I was disappointed. I learned almost as much about Frank Sinatra and his quirks from viewing the excellent 1998 made–for–cable movie "The Rat Pack," which I screened in mid–read. Directed by Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious") the film concentrates on five years (from about 1956 to 1961) in the lives of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, omitting female rat packer Shirley McLaine.
 
Sinatra's mob connections, which are common knowledge, are covered in voluminous detail by British authors Summers and Swan, husband and wife and collaborators on an excellent biography of Richard Nixon. As I said, little but a mention is made of the Sinatra Jr. kidnapping, also the subject of a recent movie. "The Rat Pack" movie goes into as much detail of the meeting of Joe Kennedy, JFK's and Bobby's father, with Sinatra as does the book. I wanted more on this crucial meeting. Joe Kennedy knew his son had to defeat Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia, a state where 95 percent of the voters were and are Protestants – if he had any chance of winning the nomination in Los Angeles in 1960.
 
The elder Kennedy knew of Sinatra's connections with Sam "Momo" Giancano and the Chicago mobster's connections with Democratic power brokers in West Virginia. Sinatra delivered on the deal, only to be shunned after the election by the elder Kennedy, JFK's wife and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, a man feared and hated by Sinatra's mobster pals. The authors document their book with about 100 pages of notes, making it the most definitive book on the subject.
 
All the facts are there in the Summers/Swan biography, but it has a leaden feel. I don't think anyone is surprised at this late date to learn of Sinatra's mood swings and his compulsive womanizing, subjects that are covered to death in the book. I did appreciate Chapter 18, detailing Sinatra's collaboration with arranger Nelson Riddle, a fellow New Jersey native who was as much of a perfectionist as Sinatra. Sinatra the Bully often ended up terrorizing Riddle. Charles Higham, a writer who often dined with Riddle at Musso & Franks Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, described the arranger after he finished a session with Sinatra: "That gentle sweet man would come to the table shaking after a session with Frank."
 
Still, Sinatra publicly praised Riddle as "the greatest arranger in the world" "with the biggest bag of tricks" as any orchestrator he knew, the authors said. I wanted more of the artistic aspects – material like this – from Summers and Swan. Sinatra appeared in an amazing number of movies, more than 40, but there is little about his film work, aside from the career renewing role in "From Here to Eternity." There is some detail about Rat Pack behavior during the filming of "Some Came Running" in the Ohio River town of Madison, Ind. in the 1950s. Maybe we'll have to rely on David Thomson or another film writer to give us a more comprehensive look at Sinatra's movie work.
 
Would I recommend the book: Yes. It's a valuable book with plenty of insights into Sinatra's relationships, especially the one with Ava Gardner, the love of his life.
 
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Another man who did it his way was South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, the subject of "Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond" by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson (PublicAffairs, 415 Pages, 16 pages of illustrations, $27.50). First elected to office in 1929, Thurmond (1902–2003) will probably be remembered for fathering a child with his family's black maid. The child, a retired Los Angeles teacher named Essie Mae Washington–Williams, was 78 when she revealed to the world after Thurmond's death that she was his child. Her name was carved onto Thurmond's tombstone on July 1, 2004, exactly a year after Strom's funeral in his birthplace of Edgefield, S.C.
 
Bass and Thompson are veteran South Carolina reporters who authored a previous biography of Thurmond in 2003, "Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond" (University of South Carolina Press). This latest book, a masterful delineation of South Carolina political folkways, was necessary in the wake of Ms. Washington–Williams' confirmation of what many people in the Palmetto State had already suspected. Before reading "Strom" I knew that South Carolina was a rambunctious place, but the book shows it as lively and complex as Louisiana, home of the Long clan and as distinctive a place as any in the United States.
 
The authors explain the territoriality of South Carolina politics. For a small town – 2,500 people – Edgefield and its same–named county on the Savannah River have produced a large number of famous and infamous Palmetto State politicos, including the notorious racist Pitchfork Ben Tillman. It must be something in the water. Edgefield County was not a friendly place to its black residents, the authors note: In December 1881, in the wake of the post–Reconstruction repression of African–Americans, about 5,000 of the county's blacks – roughly a fifth of the black population – left the county en mass for a better life in Arkansas.
 
Strom Thurmond will probably be best remembered for his sexual exploits and his virility, but he was a war hero in World War II, flying a glider in the Normandy Invasion in June 1944, heading the breakaway Dixiecrat third party state's rights movement in the 1948 presidential election against Truman and Dewey and marrying beauty queens a fraction of his age. Strom's virility is summed up in the one–liner by a U.S. Senatorial colleague: "When he dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat in order to close the coffin lid."
 
Just 41 years ago June 19, Thurmond joined West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd and other mostly Democratic senators in voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That same summer saw three voting rights activists, two whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one black, James Chaney, murdered in Philadelphia, Miss. The trial of reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for their murders is has concluded and the jury is deciding the fate of the octogenarian as of this publication. Flash: Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter June 21, 2005.
 
Unlike his colleague from West Virginia, Thurmond never was in the Ku Klux Klan; his position in Edgefield County was high in the social pecking order and the wearers of white sheets were generally from lower social classes. There is no doubt that Thurmond was a segregationist, but he didn't indulge in racist letter writing. The authors suggest that his relationship with his black daughter may have modified his racism to the point where supported and voted to confirm black judges and justices, particularly Clarence Thomas for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.
 
Packed with anecdotes, "Strom" is a major contribution to American political history. It's worth reading by general readers and political wonks alike.
 
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Sept. 11, 2001 was the defining date in the political career of Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York since Jan. 1, 1994, but Fred Siegel assures us in "The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life" (Encounter Books, 415 pages, $26.95) that the political career of this Republican who can win Democratic votes is anything but over. I personally think Rudy Giuliani has a good shot at heading the GOP Presidential ticket in 2008 and I suspect that Siegel, a professor of history at New York's Cooper Union, feels that way too.
 
Siegel, who was assisted in his book by son Harry, is the author of the widely acclaimed "The Future Once Happened Here," about New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Siegel, not a member of the left–wing, hate–America professoriat, is obviously a fan of Giuliani and his brand of leadership, but he portrays the crime–fighting, detail–oriented (sometimes too detail oriented!) mayor warts and all.
 
The most famous Empire State prosecutor since Thomas E. Dewey, Giuliani was defeated by about 50,000 votes by David N. Dinkins in 1989 in his first run for mayor. He defeated Dinkins, New York City's first black mayor, in the 1993 racially charged election by about the same margin. He was re–elected in 1997 in a city where you need a metal detector to find a Republican (except in the Borough of Richmond or Staten Island). Speaking of boroughs, Siegel shortens it to "boros" throughout, making me wonder if this is a quirk of his or an example of a copy editor asleep at the switch. There were a few other typos in the book (Bernie Kerik's hometown of Paterson, N.J. is spelled "Patterson"; it's Congressman Jerrold Nadler, not "Gerald", etc.) which could have benefited from photographs. On the plus side, "Prince of the City" has excellent documentation and notes, and is well indexed.
 
Giuliani, a workaholic surrounded by workaholic "Rudettes," hit the ground running to reverse the city's decline. He hired William Bratton, a devotee of the "broken windows" school of policing, as police commissioner. The theory behind "broken windows" is to go after the subway turnstile jumpers, squeegee men, panhandlers and perps of so–called victimless crime, who make life in big cities so unpleasant and dangerous. Bratton, whose ego was at least as big as Giuliani's succeeded all too well and ended up getting booted out by the mayor in 1996 after he made the cover of Time magazine for his crime reduction successes. Bratton is now police chief of Los Angeles. By 2000, New York City had fewer murders than Chicago, which has about 1/3 the population of Gotham.
 
Giuliani was opposed in the 1997 mayoral election by Ruth Messinger, described somewhat unkindly by the author as the very model of the West Side Manhattan limousine liberal who decries candidates who send their kids to private schools – and is herself a product of private schooling. When she announced her candidacy, she inveighed against pols who drive big black cars, only to leave the session in a city–owned black car–probably a Town Car – that was one of her perks as Manhattan borough president. Siegel points out that the reporters on the scene didn't miss the irony and reported it. She was defeated soundly by Giuliani, not even carrying her base of Manhattan , with 75 percent of the Jewish vote – she's Jewish – going for the Catholic Brooklyn–born Republican Giuliani.
 
Rudy Giuliani is a Republican who gets along well with centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton. In fact, Siegel describes how annoyed GOP leaders like New York gubernatorial candidate George Pataki were with Rudy when he supported his Democratic opponent incumbent Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994 over Pataki. Pataki won and cut the mayor dead, for a few weeks. They eventually reconciled, Siegel reports. Giuliani, who admired Clinton, gave a perfunctory, "pro forma" endorsement of Clinton's 1996 opponent, Bob Dole.
 
Much of the book is devoted to the crises Giuliani and the city faced before 9/11, including the Amadou Diallo shooting and various challenges to Rudy's often arrogant governing style. The guy doesn't suffer fools gladly and most of the world is foolish in his eyes! I was impressed with the former mayor last November when I attended sessions of the Urban Land Institute – including one in which he spoke to the ULI attendees at the New York Hilton.
 
Siegel briefly discusses Giuliani's messy private life, including his nationally publicized divorce of his wife Donna Hanover and his subsequent marriage to Judith Nathan. A registered nurse, Nathan helped the mayor with his prostate cancer treatment in 2000, advising him to consider a non–surgical approach. It's a great deal when your girlfriend–soon–to–be–wife can give free and useful medical advice!
 
What Siegel doesn't answer to my satisfaction is why anyone in his right mind would want to be mayor of New York, the media center of the known universe, where every detail of one's life is examined by irritating (is there any other kind?) reporters. This is an entertaining and enlightening book. And yes, there was a 2003 made–for–TV movie–"Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story" – starring the excellent actor James Woods as Rudy – about America's Mayor. It's worth viewing.
 
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"Sinatra" Web site: www.aaknopf.com
"Strom" Web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com
"Prince of the City" Web site: www.encounterbooks.com

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